October 2009 Archive

Architecture teams often spend a significant amount of their time working with or consulting for IT project teams. This is a recognized best practice for ensuring that project teams execute in line with the architecture and for demonstrating that the architecture team provides tangible value, but it is also a double-edged sword. The downside is when IT management perceives that the EA team's primary value is in tactical problem solving.

Jeff Scott and I presented a teleconference entitled “Next-Generation Enterprise Architecture” last week. It was a lively session with a lot of material on our side and a lot of questions from attendees. We focused on the questions over the phone in the live session and decided it was best to handle the written questions that came in via the Webex chat in a blog post.

CIOs want to know what new technologies they should watch
for their firm’s possible use.They need
to know when they should make an investment of time to learn a technology, and educate
their business on its potential – or be prepared to answer their questions.They want to time their own adoption - for
example, with cloud-based
services, they want to maximize benefits, avoid the bleeding edge, and smoothly
fold it in with their plans.CIOs need a
‘technology watch list' when they have a central architecture teams, they delegate
creating this list to that team.These
teams tap their sources - and one source the architecture teams tap to scan the
long list of technologies is Forrester.

At Forrester, we are challenged to identify the top
technologies, too.Our problem is a bit
different from our clients – we follow so many technologies, hear from so vendors
and thought leaders, and of course every analyst will have their own network
and assessment.To sort through
everything that could be on a watch list and pick the ones which CIOs should
watch, we involve many analysts and use a simple set of criteria:

Forrester's annual State of Enterprise Architecture survey needs more respondents! Help Forrester benchmark EA's progress by answering a set of 25 questions on how architecture is practiced in large enterprises. At the end of the survey, we'll ask you if you wish to attend a complimentary webinar on the results. All participants will receive an Excel workbook of the results. Thank